Sims 3 won't load after launcher

[kelmothebrave]

My game had been working just fine, and I downloaded a few worlds from the sims 3 store, and now all of a sudden the launcher will open only through the origin page and even then when I press play the game loads for a bit, goes to black screen, and then i'm back at my desktop with the game supposedly still open but not loading and i'm unable to quit without windows task manager.  this has happened once before right after i'd downloaded an expantion pack from origin which i'd fixed by updating my internet security (after redownloading all my games and of course loosing all my data) but this time everything is updated and i have no clue how to fix it.  and i'm getting the sense that it has something to do with the supposedly legitimate content downloaded from origin....

[crinrict]

Are you sure there isn't some program running a scan in the background ? That's usually the cause for the game minimizing.

What happens if you try to maximize it. Does it minimize again right away ?

You can also try if this helps:

Try resttetting your user files as described in the factory reset described in this post: http://answers.ea.com/t5/The-Sims-3/FAQ-Troubleshooting-Steps/td-p/714/

You won't loose anything. Just make sure to not delete any files  and make a backup.

[kelmothebrave]

i got it to work in windowed mode, so then i figured that like you said something must be running in the background.  i went throught the whole windows clean boot thing but never actually figured out what program was causing the problem, but i guess after restarting my computer like 12 times it did something because now it's working in fullscreen mode... no clue what i did... and i have a feeling the problem will probably start again but it's good for now...